So President Obama will be giving his Statue of the Union Speech tonight at 9pm Eastern. The focus of the speech is supposedly going to be around a 'year of action', in which Obama will say that if he has to act alone without congressional support, he will.
The question to me though, from a PR point-of-view, is does the SOTU speech even matter any longer?
Ever since Bush these SOTU speeches are essentially 'morale' boosters. They hit on the same themes year-after-year: Our best years are ahead of us; If we come together there is nothing we can't do; The middle class is the backbone of America and we must support having a strong middle class.
And yet, year-after-year things stay the same or get worse, partisanship stays the same or gets worse and the middle class stays the same or gets worse.
At a certain point does anyone really care what the President has to say after years of empty promises?
In a CNN poll not to long ago 53 per cent of Americans said they do not find Obama trustworthy or honest. I mean, think about that... more than half the nation think the "Hope and Change" President is a liar.
In a survey of millennials, 47 per cent said they would recall Obama as President if they could and 57 per cent said they disapprove of Obamacare.
In a recent WSJ poll they found that 63 per cent of Americans feel the country is on the wrong track.
Obama's approval rating at this point in his presidency (which is 43 per cent approve) is only 4 points above what Bush's was (which was 39 per cent at this time) - when you consider that most people thought Bush was an idiot, that's not good.
The labor participation rate (the number of people in the labor market... ie. working) has hit all time lows. Only 62.8 per cent of Americans have a job, the lowest since 1978 (91.8 million people are not in the labor market). And yet the 'unemployment' rate is now supposedly 6.7 per cent (for obvious reasons, you are only 'unemployed' if you are getting unemployment benefits, once you move off those you simply are no longer counted in the unemployment statistics. Or if you graduate and don't get a job you aren't counted as 'unemployed' because you were never employed to start with).
So that's the context in which Obama will be giving his SOTU speech tonight and one has to wonder if anything he says really matters any longer.
He's had five full years to address the economy and the plight of the middle class and has failed to do so. While he did launch Obamacare, it was a disastrous launch and whether or not the program will work in the long run is still to be seen.
From a PR perspective he has to give a SOTU speech because it's tradition. Yet from an impact-on-the-nation perspective I don't think anything he says will really matter.
As the saying goes 'talk is cheap' ... which ironically is the worst thing you want people to think from a PR perspective because for messaging to be powerful the audience must believe that talk is NOT cheap, that talk is what leads to change, that talk is a representation of the person doing the talking. When your audience no longer believes this, when they believe that 'talk is cheap', you become nothing more than a guy in a suit wasting everyone's time.
Obama dug this grave for himself by over-doing it in his past speeches. He played a 'short term' PR game at the expensive of his 'long term' PR game. After five years of promising this, that and the other thing, he's now reached a point where no one particularly cares what he has to say anymore.
If this were a company and Obama was the CEO the simple truth is that he would be relieved of his duties - not necessarily because of his job performance (let's face he's no worse than congress) but for purely PR reasons. You cannot lead effectively if people have no desire to listen to you.
But let's reserve judgement, perhaps he will surprise us tonight and his SOTU speech will rally the nation. I'm not holding my breath though.
The question to me though, from a PR point-of-view, is does the SOTU speech even matter any longer?
Ever since Bush these SOTU speeches are essentially 'morale' boosters. They hit on the same themes year-after-year: Our best years are ahead of us; If we come together there is nothing we can't do; The middle class is the backbone of America and we must support having a strong middle class. And yet, year-after-year things stay the same or get worse, partisanship stays the same or gets worse and the middle class stays the same or gets worse.
At a certain point does anyone really care what the President has to say after years of empty promises?
In a CNN poll not to long ago 53 per cent of Americans said they do not find Obama trustworthy or honest. I mean, think about that... more than half the nation think the "Hope and Change" President is a liar.
In a survey of millennials, 47 per cent said they would recall Obama as President if they could and 57 per cent said they disapprove of Obamacare.
In a recent WSJ poll they found that 63 per cent of Americans feel the country is on the wrong track.
Obama's approval rating at this point in his presidency (which is 43 per cent approve) is only 4 points above what Bush's was (which was 39 per cent at this time) - when you consider that most people thought Bush was an idiot, that's not good.
The labor participation rate (the number of people in the labor market... ie. working) has hit all time lows. Only 62.8 per cent of Americans have a job, the lowest since 1978 (91.8 million people are not in the labor market). And yet the 'unemployment' rate is now supposedly 6.7 per cent (for obvious reasons, you are only 'unemployed' if you are getting unemployment benefits, once you move off those you simply are no longer counted in the unemployment statistics. Or if you graduate and don't get a job you aren't counted as 'unemployed' because you were never employed to start with).
So that's the context in which Obama will be giving his SOTU speech tonight and one has to wonder if anything he says really matters any longer.
He's had five full years to address the economy and the plight of the middle class and has failed to do so. While he did launch Obamacare, it was a disastrous launch and whether or not the program will work in the long run is still to be seen.
From a PR perspective he has to give a SOTU speech because it's tradition. Yet from an impact-on-the-nation perspective I don't think anything he says will really matter.
As the saying goes 'talk is cheap' ... which ironically is the worst thing you want people to think from a PR perspective because for messaging to be powerful the audience must believe that talk is NOT cheap, that talk is what leads to change, that talk is a representation of the person doing the talking. When your audience no longer believes this, when they believe that 'talk is cheap', you become nothing more than a guy in a suit wasting everyone's time.
Obama dug this grave for himself by over-doing it in his past speeches. He played a 'short term' PR game at the expensive of his 'long term' PR game. After five years of promising this, that and the other thing, he's now reached a point where no one particularly cares what he has to say anymore.
If this were a company and Obama was the CEO the simple truth is that he would be relieved of his duties - not necessarily because of his job performance (let's face he's no worse than congress) but for purely PR reasons. You cannot lead effectively if people have no desire to listen to you.
But let's reserve judgement, perhaps he will surprise us tonight and his SOTU speech will rally the nation. I'm not holding my breath though.
Comments
Post a Comment